RubyKaigi is Japan’s “home” Ruby conference and the organizers have just put 27 videos from the RubyKaigi 2010 conference online. Unfortunately I can’t link to them individually as they’re embedded on a single page, so head over to rubykaigi.tdiary.net and check them out.

Presentation titles include: Ruby 2.0, Ruby API is Improved Unix API, Rocking The Enterprise With Ruby, Mapping the World with DataMapper, The Necessity and Implementation of Speedy Tests, A Metaprogramming Spell Book, Conflicts and Resolutions in Ruby and Rails, and User Experience for Library Designers.

Two caveats: 1) Be aware that some of the presentations are in Japanese (unsurprisingly) although most of the slides include English and, of course, any Ruby is still readable. Read More

SimpleCov builds on the ideas presented in Aaron Patterson’s recent, and awesome, Writing a Code Coverage Tool with Ruby 1.9 blog post. The result is a powerful yet straightforward code coverage tool that puts out some well formatted stats. Read More

Jeremy Evans (of Sequel fame) has created home_run, a performance-focused C reimplementation of Ruby’s Date and DateTime classes. They work out to be significantly faster than the native Ruby classes while retaining compatibility (mostly).

Jeremy makes the surprising claim that “the standard library Date class is slow enough to be the bottleneck in much (if not most) of code that uses it”, but goes on to prove the point with a Rails related benchmark where retrieving all objects for two different models gets a 2x and 3x speedup with home_run loaded.

I hope that Jeremy ultimately aims to get his work included into MRI (as happened with FasterCSV replacing CSV in the stdlib) as standard. Read More

In Skinny Daemons, Dave Hrycyszyn presents a practical walkthrough of how he builds what he calls “skinny daemons” – small, HTTP based daemons to perform single tasks that are then packaged up into gems for easy installation (across multiple servers, for example). It’s a practical demonstration and holds your hand the whole way. Useful stuff.

An example of a skinny daemon is enigmamachine, a video processor Web service using ffmpeg to convert videos to profiles of your choice. Read More

Back in June, I did a comparison of Mongoid and MongoMapper, the two best known MongoDB libraries for Ruby. Now, Ben Myles has brought another to the fore: Mongomatic.

I haven’t given it a try myself yet, but Ben’s done a good job of presenting it, along with example code, so check it out if MongoDB is your bag.

If you want more MongoDB related news, check out coder.io’s #mongodb tag. Lots of great stuff there. Read More

Aaron Patterson (of Nokogiri fame) has written a post for the AT&T Interactive blog about writing a code coverage tool with Ruby 1.9:

It turns out that Ruby 1.9 already comes with support for code coverage monitoring. Aaron looks at how it works and improves how we interact with it a shade. Read More